Worlds of Flow: A History of Hydrodynamics from the Bernoullis to Prandtl

J. Stewart TurnerReviewed by

Citation: Physics Today 59, 8, 52 (2006); doi: 10.1063/1.2349735

View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2349735
View Table of Contents: http://physicstoday.scitation.org/toc/pto/59/8
Published by the American Institute of Physics
Van der Waals
Forces
A Handbook for Biologists,
Chemists, Engineers, and
Physicists
V. Adrian Parsegian
Cambridge U. Press, New York,
2006. $110.00, $50.00 paper (380
pp.). ISBN 0-521-83906-8,
ISBN 0-521-54778-4 paper
Van der Waals forces—in competition
with electrostatic interactions—are ar-
guably the most
prevalent and rele-
vant forces for under-
standing the proper-
ties of materials and
living systems. Ac-
cordingly, research
on these forces has
enjoyed a long and
rich history of funda-
mental physics con-
tributions, and many expositions on
their applications in chemistry, colloid
science, and biology have been written.
Adrian Parsegian’s monograph Van der
Waals Forces: A Handbook for Biologists,
Chemists, Engineers, and Physicists is a
highly original work that offers a wel-
come, stimulating, and useful addition
to the literature.
The book succeeds in achieving two
extremely ambitious goals. First, it sets
out to demystify the classic theories
from more than 60 years ago of Hendrik
B. G. Casimir, Evgeny M. Lifshitz, and
their coworkers in which dispersion in-
teractions were first connected to the
electromagnetic modes of continua. To
that end, Parsegian discusses in detail
the basic starting points and formal der-
ivations underlying this statistical
physics approach and its status relative
to the earlier atomistic theories. Second,
the book is intended as a how-to man-
ual for biologists, chemists, engineers,
and physicists. In this regard, a signifi-
cant fraction of its 380 pages is devoted
to a compilation and annotation of
exact and approximate analytical re-
sults for dispersion interactions as ex-
plicit functions of the measured dielec-
tric properties of real materials.
The book begins with the “Prelude,”
in which the long history and esthetic
beauty of the subject are introduced.
The reader learns about alternative ap-
proaches to dispersion interactions and
begins to understand the respective
strengths and limitations of those ap-
proaches and their reconciliations with
one another. Chemists, biologists, and
chemical engineers will be more famil-
52 August 2006 Physics Today
iar with the classic long-range 1/r6 at-
traction between molecules in gases or
colloidal particles in solution; physi-
cists will be more familiar with the
generic interactions between macro-
scopic objects arising from their pertur-
bation of the electromagnetic spectrum
of the intervening medium.
From the outset, the technical expo-
sition is enriched by physical insights
and clarifying, general remarks about
the basic phenomena involved. For ex-
ample, on page 20, in anticipation of the
more systematic analyses that follow
throughout the rest of the book, readers
find the disarmingly simple statement,
“A good rule of thumb is that interac-
tion energies between two bodies in any
geometry will be significant compared
to kT as long as their separation is less
than their size.” Similarly, on the fol-
lowing page, readers are treated to a
wonderful dimensional analysis of why
a bug can’t be too big if it wants to stick
to the ceiling, and why it should have
the right shape to do so.
The charming but substantive prel-
ude is followed by “Level 1: Introduc-
tion.” In this section, the essential in-
gredients of the modern theory of
dispersion forces are presented, in par-
ticular the roles of imaginary frequen-
cies in the electromagnetic spectrum, of
zero-point energy, and of retardation ef-
fects. Of particular physical interest is
the brief discussion of certain less fa-
miliar features of van der Waals forces,
including repulsive interactions and
torques between macroscopic bodies.
An introduction to layered materials
and the effects of spherical and cylin-
drical geometries is also presented.
The heart of the book, “Level 2: Prac-
tice,” gives an account of how to calculate
dispersion interactions from the general
expressions of Lifshitz and others. The
author gives tables of exact and approxi-
mate formulas for basic geometries and
model systems—for example, for small
and large separations, assuming no re-
tardation; for small differences in per-
mittivity; and so forth. At least as impor-
tant as the tables are the accompanying
essays on the tabulated formulas, which
discuss the status of the various approx-
imations involved, connections to the
particle theory for gases and dilute sus-
pensions (the Hamaker theory), the
breakdown of pairwise additivity, gener-
alizations to include ionic solution con-
tributions, and the case of molecules and
colloids interacting with substrates. This
lengthy section ends with several ex-
tremely useful and edifying examples—
including MathCad programs—of the
actual computation of dispersion interac-
tions from both phenomenological mod-
els and measured spectra of the dielectric
response for water and for particular hy-
drocarbons and metal systems of interest.
Just when readers are feeling good
about having reached the end of the
story, they are given an additional treat
in the concluding section, “Level 3:
Foundations.” The author instructs
readers in the mode summation ap-
proach of Nico van Kampen and col-
leagues by using it to derive general
results of Lifshitz and coworkers and
by working through the particular case
of two semi-infinite media across a
planar gap. He also shows how this
fundamental theory can be general-
ized to multilayer systems, inhomoge-
neous media with spatially varying di-
electric functions, and ion-containing
anisotropic systems.
Throughout, the book contains sev-
eral dozen problems of all kinds, with
explicit solutions provided in an ap-
pendix, as well as a thoughtfully anno-
tated bibliography of relevant primary
and secondary sources. I can easily
imagine Van der Waals Forces becoming
an integral part of the personal libraries
of the many types of scientists for
whom it was written.
William M. Gelbart
University of California
Los Angeles
Worlds of Flow
A History of Hydrodynamics
from the Bernoullis to Prandtl
Olivier Darrigol
Oxford U. Press, New York, 2005.
$74.50 (356 pp.).
ISBN 0-19-856843-6
Olivier Darrigol is a
distinguished his-
torian of science
who had previously
published a prize-
winning volume,
Electrodynamics
from Ampère to Ein-
stein (Oxford U.
Press, 2000), on an-
other branch of
physics. His latest book, Worlds of Flow:
A History of Hydrodynamics from the
Bernoullis to Prandtl, will be of most in-
terest to historians, especially those
who already have some knowledge of
the scientists, engineers, and scientific
topics that the author covers.
The text is very mathematical. Dar-
rigol repeats the detailed derivations of
the earlier mathematicians, including
their sidetracks and mistakes, but with
modern vector notation and methods.
www.physicstoday.org
His book could also attract a wider au-
dience: By skating over the details and
gaining a broad view of the achieve-
ments and interactions of the pioneers,
scientists who use hydrodynamics will
find Darrigol’s treatment interesting
and entertaining. He covers more than
a century of hydrodynamics in detail,
from the 18th century to the early 20th
century, when physicists began to
tackle boundary effects in nonidealized
flows.
In the 18th and 19th centuries there
was a clear distinction between hydro-
dynamics and hydraulics, and the fields
evolved independently. Hydrodynam-
ics was the application of advanced
mathematics to idealized flows rarely
encountered by engineers, who used
empirical formulas to make progress
with practical hydraulics problems.
Only in the 20th century were the chal-
lenges of real flows properly dealt with
by physically based theories, and those
developments, too, are well described
by Darrigol. The early contributors to
the tortuous development of the equa-
tions of motion of inviscid fluids in-
clude the Swiss mathematicians Leon-
hard Euler, Johann Bernoulli, and
Johann’s son Daniel; and the French-
men Joseph Louis de Lagrange and Jean
le Rond d’Alembert. Although these
names are now attached to their re-
spective mathematical results, a great
deal of overlap and interaction exists
between each formulation.
One problem that the early theorists
could solve was the motion of waves on
a free surface. French mathematicians
provided strong input, but most water-
wave phenomena were well known in
navigation contexts, both at sea and in
canals, before they could be explained.
British physicists paid more attention to
such practical questions than did their
continental peers; they provided useful
solutions to those questions and added
to fundamental theory. A striking exam-
ple of the different approach by British
hydraulic engineers was John Scott Rus-
sell’s accidental discovery of what are
now known as solitary waves. A canal
boat, towed at high speed and then sud-
denly stopped, produced a large wave
of permanent form that continued to
progress independently along the canal.
Russell’s observations and the deduc-
tions from them were brilliant; his theo-
retical insights, however, were not very
sound, and he was strongly criticized by
his contemporaries—in particular in the
work of George Biddell Airy, George
Gabriel Stokes, and William Thomson
(later known as Lord Kelvin).
Much more firmly based contribu-
www.physicstoday.org
tions to other aspects of wave theory
were made by British mathematicians.
Among them were Airy, who wrote an
influential review, Tides and Waves, pub-
lished in 1845, and Stokes, who studied
finite oscillatory waves. Thomson made
notable contributions to the theory of
capillary waves, the understanding of
three-dimensional ship-wave patterns,
and the concept of group velocity.
The French civil engineer Claude
Louis Navier was the first to break away
from the concept of a perfect fluid by ob-
taining a hydrodynamic equation for
viscous flow in 1821. Two other French
mathematicians, Augustin Cauchy and
Siméon Poisson, rediscovered Navier’s
equation before Stokes independently
derived it in 1845, but it was many years
before the Navier–Stokes equation be-
came a standard tool in hydrodynamics.
Stokes used the equation in the linear
approximation to derive the formula for
the velocity of a sphere sinking through
a viscous fluid; but this method only
helped for laminar flow.
In the 1860s, Hermann von
Helmholtz invented another approach
to the problem of fluid friction; his ap-
proach was based on vortex-like solu-
tions of Euler’s equations. He intro-
duced the concept of a vortex sheet and
first applied the theory to sound gener-
ation in organ pipes and then to vortex
rings. His ideas were enthusiastically
received and were followed up by his
colleague and friend Thomson and
other British mathematicians. The gap
between small- and large-scale physics
began to narrow. What is now called the
Kelvin–Helmholtz instability was ob-
served both in the laboratory and in the
atmosphere, and a photograph of the
experiment is presented and described
in Worlds of Flow.
Stokes and Thomson studied other
instabilities, but the two friends had dif-
ferent views about the roles of viscosity
and surfaces of discontinuity. Lord
Rayleigh studied inviscid flow between
fixed walls and concluded that parallel
flow without an inflexion point in the
velocity profile is stable. The engineer
Osborne Reynolds showed that for tur-
bulence to occur in pipe flow, a small
viscosity is essential. He demonstrated
the concept experimentally and intro-
duced the dimensionless ratio later
named in his honor. Factors that impede
ship motion, including the effects of
large eddies, surface waves, and skin
friction, were tackled by many mathe-
maticians in the late 19th century.
The decisive step to understanding
skin friction was taken by the German
mathematician Ludwig Prandtl, who
August 2006 Physics Today 53 See www.pt.ims.ca/9467-17
introduced the boundary-layer ap-
proach. Prandtl showed that viscosity is
only significant in a thin layer near a solid
surface and that flow outside the layer
can be treated as inviscid. He went on to
study the formation of turbulent bound-
ary layers and the criteria for boundary-
layer separation. Wing theory, the un-
derstanding of lift and drag, and the
development of the whole of modern
aeronautics have depended on his ideas.
Despite its extensive treatment of the
history of hydrodynamics, I have a per-
sonal disappointment with Worlds of
Flow: It is a pity that the author chose to
See www.pt.ims.ca/9467-18
end the story with Prandtl, with only a
passing reference to Geoffrey Taylor, a
towering figure in British fluid me-
chanics whose life and contributions
overlapped with Prandtl’s. Nonethe-
less, by presenting in detail the interac-
tions between many mathematicians
and engineers, and by emphasizing the
different styles characteristic of scien-
tists in different countries, Darrigol has
provided a fascinating insight into the
development of hydrodynamics.
J. Stewart Turner
Australian National University
Canberra
Photonic Crystals
Towards Nanoscale Photonic
Devices
Jean-Michel Lourtioz, Henri
Benisty, Vincent Berger,
Jean-Michel Gérard, Daniel
Maystre, and Alexis Tchelnokov
(translated from French by
Pierre-Noel Favennec)
Springer, New York, 2005. $99.00
(426 pp.). ISBN 3-540-24431-X
Photonic crystals are artificial periodic
structures in which electromagnetic
wave dispersion can be engineered and
controlled, in analogy to the way the
bands of electrons in semiconductor
crystals are manipulated. The field in-
volves the discovery and creation of
those types of photonic crystals that
have interesting properties, and a pho-
tonic bandgap is only one such prop-
erty. Today, a whole array of photonic
crystals illustrate one aspect or another
of basic science, fulfill various practical
aims, or occasionally provide physi-
cally based pigments in living things.
The study of photonic crystals spans
solid-state physics, physical optics,
crystallography, quantum optics, elec-
tromagnetic engineering, and even bi-
ology. The range and escalation of the
field have led to the defeat of most re-
searchers’ attempts to provide a con-
temporary follow-up to the beautiful
introductory monograph Photonic Crys-
tals: Molding the Flow of Light (Princeton
U. Press, 1995) by John D. Joannopou-
los, Robert D. Meade, and Joshua N.
Winn. In the past 10 years a large num-
ber of books have emerged, but the
very breadth of the subject means that
such volumes as Photonic Crystals: Ad-
vances in Design, Fabrication, and Charac-
terization (Wiley-VCH, 2004), edited by
Kurt Busch and coworkers; Photonic
Crystals: Physics, Fabrication and Appli-
cations (Springer, 2004), edited by Kuon
Inoue and Kazuo Ohtaka; and Electro-
magnetic Theory and Applications for Pho-
tonic Crystals (CRC Press, 2005), edited
by Kiyotoshi Yasumoto, have usually
consisted of collections of discrete arti-
cles written by individual authors and
supervised by editors. Many worthy
writers have been defeated in their at-
tempts to create a single comprehen-
sive text.
In Photonic Crystals: Towards
Nanoscale Photonic Devices, Jean-Michel
Lourtioz and his colleagues have come
out with an impressive major volume
that covers many of the main themes of
photonic crystals, but it required the
concerted effort of six coauthors. The
English version, thanks to translator
54 August 2006 Physics Today